“I always play it hidden away alone”: Can anyone get into free jazz, the most harmful music in history? | jazz

IIn the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his writer friend Byron Cooley to provide him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s legendary avant-garde jazz scene firsthand in the late 1970s, but “wasn’t that familiar with it,” he says. “Maybe I was too young and too caught up in the wave of activity in punk and the lack of a wave.” Now, he was eager to know more.

The tapes “by Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees into free jazz: a style of jazz separated from standard rhythms and phrases, resulting in the most challenging and distant music one could listen to. “Music that is liberated but at the same time completely indebted to the techniques acquired in its tradition,” is how Moore describes it enthusiastically. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with the open form comes from studying the historical lineage of the music… It’s really spiritual music, both political and spiritual.”

Moore has become a long-time supporter of this music. Sonic Youth has played live with the legendary New York Art Quartet, while Moore has released free jazz albums on his own, Ecstatic Peace! attached. His latest project is the book Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80, co-written with Cooley and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson.

An attempt to counter what he calls “dry, academic writing” on the subject – “enthusiasm is key, we didn’t want to sugarcoat it” – the book aims to introduce the music to a wider audience. It’s beautifully put together, features some wonderfully catchy writing (“Many listeners deny it’s jazz of any kind,” she offers an entry for the 1980 album Porbetomagus, “But Those Wet Wipes Could Fly on the Moon”) and comes with an introduction by Nene Cherry. She grew up with many of the albums mentioned in the book, thanks to her stepfather Don Cherry, a trumpeter who worked with Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist who invented the term free jazz with the 1961 album of the same name. “I feel like I know free jazz as soul,” she writes. “I thought of it as an obligation and a necessity, like food.”

However, it is tempting to say that Moore and his colleagues have set themselves a difficult task. Free jazz “has been ridiculed by critics,” Moore says, and is often described as “noise or nonsense.” Now Jazz Now recommends Free Fall, the 1963 album by Jimmy Giuffre, the popular West Coast clarinetist and a key figure in the development of “cool” jazz, but notes that its release was “a complete commercial failure… Giuffre stopped recording for 10 years afterward.” He also disbanded the trio who made it after the party in which they each received 35 cents. Early on, major labels and venerable jazz institutions, including Impulse!, were willing to work, but very quickly it became the domain of small independents and musicians releasing their own work.

Decades later, they still seem to carry a unique aura for the average listener, as Joachim Hoogland – who runs the Oslo-based label Smalltown Supersound – can attest. One Sonic Youth fan discovered free jazz through an album released by Moore – Arthur Doyle’s Alabama Feel – and was instantly hooked, recognizing the same unpredictability he found at punk and alternative rock gigs. “I got so tired of live concerts, because I felt like they were pretty much the same: people were dressed up and making the right moves,” he says. “Free jazz is something that is created on the spot; you can tell when it works and when it doesn’t. I love the fact that some parts of the concert are 100% connected and sometimes they drift away from each other. It’s about emotion and physicality, and it’s happening in the moment.”

The Haugland label is known for releasing dance music by Lindstrøm, Todd Terje, and Kelly Lee Owens, among others. She also releases a lot of free jazz, but “not because it sells; it’s because it’s something I have to do for myself.” He has also published a book on the subject, Johannes Rohde’s comprehensive free jazz and improvisation on LP and CD 1965-2024. But as Hoagland cheerfully admits: “I always play free jazz in secret, when I’m alone, because people think I’m crazy listening to it, and that there’s no way I’ll like it. There’s an old expression: ‘It sounds like Polish free jazz or something.’ As if Polish free jazz were the worst thing in the world.”

I know what it means. I’m not a listener who needs music to be melodic or rhythmically clear. I’m the proud owner of the infamous Swans live album Public Castration Is a Good Idea – the original, I might add, not the remake – and an 11-album collection of recordings from the extreme electronic label Come Organisation, hours of deliberately hideous noise on which I happily spent nearly £300 a few years ago. I really like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine music and prefer Yoko Ono’s early 70’s albums over her husband’s. And I love jazz, a late-blooming passion, not just enduring hip: I’m as happy listening to Fats Waller or Duke Ellington’s late-1920s Columbia records as Bitches Brew or Coltrane’s Africa/Brass records. Yet, in a way, free jazz remained a closed book for me.

Both Moore and Hoagland were kind enough to offer recommendations for relative beginners. Moore suggests Peter Brotzmann’s Splash of Octet or John Csikai’s Aphrodisiaca and Cadentia Nova Danica. Hoagland chose tenor Joe McVie, whom he described as “poetry; I feel McVie pouring his whole soul through the saxophone,” and Silent Tongues, a 1975 live album by pianist Cecil Taylor, a giant figure in free jazz. (If you want an idea of ​​how disdained the genre is in some quarters, turn to Ken Burns’s beautifully researched, hugely illuminating but deeply conservative 2001 documentary series “Jazz,” in which Taylor’s approach to music is dismissed as “nonsense.”) “I like to listen to it at low volume, because it fills my living room with feelings I can’t describe,” Hoagland says. “For me, it’s comfortable and beautiful.”

I’d heard Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, an album that preceded its reputation as a particularly confrontational listen, but even one of the most popular free jazz albums is harder to find than you think: it’s been removed from streaming services and YouTube, and vinyl pressings are the domain of second-hand retailers. I finally found it in the Internet Archive, and discovered that the advance hype for it was not exaggerated. He’s completely angry and persistent, like a bomb that won’t stop going off for even a fraction of an hour.

However, I don’t find it completely unlistenable, perhaps because I can put it in a cultural context. Brötzmann was part of the same artistic ferment that gave the world krautrock, and Machine Gun seems to me to be grappling with the same issues as Can or Faust: how to make original music, with an identity distinct from the Anglo-American musical tradition, in a country whose sense of national identity is horribly scarred. Its sound also seems to speak loudly to the turmoil and upheaval of 1968, which means it works perfectly amid the turmoil of 2025. And if you like Hoagland’s idea of ​​free jazz as analogous to the unpredictable brutality of punk, well, here’s the proof.

It also acts as a kind of palate cleanser: everything else I recommend sounds positively bland in comparison, and a breeze. On Afrodisiaca’s 21-minute title track, long passages of solo trumpet or fluttering woodwinds give way to ominous silence or an explosive, raucous crescendo, to stunning effect. The tracks on side two seem less structured, but they don’t completely abandon the idea of ​​melody.

I try to use Cecil Taylor’s silent tongues at a low volume, as recommended, but that doesn’t work at all. It’s too complex and distracting to work as ambient music. However, there is something fascinating in its complexity – and, as with Brotzmann in post-Nazi Germany, there is a political influence to black artists insistently expressing their freedom in a United States that has often denied that freedom.

The stunningly deft performances on Silent Tongues’ Jitney No 2 show an amazing artistic technique put to alternative use. I don’t respond to it in the purely emotional way that Hoagland does, but it brings me closer to what Moore said about free jazz being “entirely indebted to the techniques acquired in its tradition.” It’s not about musicians doing exactly what they want, but rather being guided by the idea of ​​free self-expression through what they already know – a useful corrective to the popular idea that this is a racket that anyone can make.

But with Joe McVie’s tenor, I get that visceral emotional response. McVie’s voice, playing unaccompanied on a Swiss farm, sounds immediately and completely stunning. It goes from a kind of bleak and depressing lyricism to a piercing dissonance, and it carries you with them. No matter how far you get from the game, nothing about it feels jarring or difficult – unlike Machine Gun, which feels like it’s pinned to the wall. You’ll have to choose your moment and your mood with the latter – not that I have a problem with that – but not with the tenor: you can call it beautiful without fear of being seen as willfully transgressive.

I’m not sure how many other albums on Now Jazz Now fit this description, but from Thurston Moore’s perspective at least, exploration is the goal. “Recordings are research,” he says, “and research is the spirit of much of this music’s core vocabulary. Search, uncover, and join the revolution of the free!” Maybe I will.

Now Jazz Now: 100 Free Essential Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80 was published by Ecstatic Peace Library on December 5. Free Jazz & Improvisation on LP and CD 1965-2024 is out now, published by Smalltown Supersound